It really depends what you are doing. For many projects, scripting with some OOP is good enough (all those web projects, RoR, etc.). Having short code in an expressive language leads to less bugs.
Static typing is extremely useful because it catches all mistakes of a certain class. However, other mistakes you still have to unit test for. So if you are unit&integration testing well, the benefit of static typing is small, and you are capturing more mistakes than static typing would.
For projects where you have contract-like, long-term stable interfaces/APIs, yes, use static typing. But don't pretend it's for every project.
If you demand security by all means, means will be tried that take away other things. So demand rights AND security. It's incorrect that we can't have both (as Bruce Schneier has iterated for the last 15 years).
The German government has stated that collecting connection information beyond 1 week is unreasonable and unjustified to fight crime and terrorism. If you have reasonable suspicion, convince a judge and get a warrant, then you can wiretap as you wish, and you have the recent history. If not, don't store the data.
The German government has a guideline for all IT projects promoting the principle of collecting the least data ("Datensparsamkeit" ~= "data frugality").
Data tends to be illegally used for other things then intended. And it is not effective. It costs the government and companies real money. And it costs people their privacy without seeing something in return besides promises.
Obama must be impeached. The Congressmen and Senators who support his actions must be impeached. The courts who OK this must be removed.
The Bush government should also be impeached for torture and violation of the rules of warfare ("enemy combatants" are not humans, starting illegal wars).
If robot rules say robots aren't allowed to do X, doesn't that imply robots that do X are not allowed? So people thinking Asimovs laws are awesome should be in favor of a killer robot ban, until robots can be shown to follow the laws.
Flash applications have to be given the right to access the Webcam. You can rightclick in a flash thing and go to Settings / Global Settings and look at the privileges per site, or generally deny it (by default: ask for each domain).
spaghettification? What good isa physics engine if it can't turn every day objects into noodles?
Spaghettification is classical tidal forces, you don't need a special relativity engine for that, just a compact heavy object. What I would like to know is whether the engine also considers general relativity? Probably too complicated though, deforming space and so forth.
If courts decide GPL2 doesn't cover some loophole and people are abusing Linux in some way that Linus does not like, Linus is screwed. With Hurd, there is a license upgrade path.
AFAIK zlib is still the best if you measure the speed/compression ratio.
But technically the best way to get speed over compression is no compression at all (infinitely fast / 1).
No, because you also have to consider disk I/O time, and CPU time is relatively cheap, so on-the-fly compression is faster than no compression for many types of data.
Take zlib for example. Very little update in years. Yet its perfectly feasable that we could have a compressor that does 5% better (see 7z, kzip, etc). Yet everyone uses it.
AFAIK zlib is still the best if you measure the speed/compression ratio.
I really hope they don't put up ever more cameras. We don't need them. Crime has been falling since 1988 and the US murder rate is around 5.4 / 100,000 people. And that is close to its all time low. And terrorism is rare and unlikely to kill or hurt anyone. When can we start rolling out policy based on data and evidence not on fear?
Also, more policemen are more effective and cheaper (!) than cameras.
CCTV, unlike policemen wandering around, does not prevent violent crimes. It holds people accountable, but that is not on the mind of these people in these situation.
/sarcasm. Right, the universe just spontaneous came into existence.
From the Laws of Thermal Dynamics we know energy can not be created nor destroyed. Einstein showed us all Matter is Energy. Therefore the Universe has ALWAYS existed in one form or another. Q.E.D.
Indeed, the curvature of the universe corresponds to negative energy, which can make the energy budget zero. See "A universe from nothing" by Lawrence Krauss (talk here) on why the energy budget can be zero.
One aspect in the big bang is that you can borrow energy from quantum mechanics if you give it back within a short time (the time needs to be shorter the more energy you borrow). Combine this with extremely fast inflation and you can run away with the energy you borrowed.
Wasn't his meaning more "you shouldn't be doing it on the internet?".
If so, we can agree that you shouldn't e.g. store pictures on a computer that is connected to the internet let alone upload it somewhere. However, this has little to do with the issue. People can upload photos of you without your consent, violating your privacy (the right to be left alone).
Just take the flux limit of the telescope you are using. Multiply by 4*pi*distance^2 (the area of emitting sphere), and the duration of observation, and you have the power you need to put in at the emitter (assuming an uncollimated emitter, without any atmospheric loss -- which is acceptable in radio).
Lets assume 15 mJy for the Allen Telescope Array used by SETI, and 1 hour of observation. That gives you 70 MW to emit. The Arecibo Message sent in 1974 was 1 MW, others are at the 150 kW level.
I like some Microsoft products, but honestly, if they ditch Windows, and move their products to.NET... then ensure the.NET platform runs on Apple, Linux and a few other platforms (not terribly hard, since the tech is mostly there anyway), I think they might see some improvement.
That might happen if Microsoft is split into two companies, one for the OS, and one for the Office suite, etc. That would bring a lot of benefit to the market.
Slashdot Mirror
It really depends what you are doing. For many projects, scripting with some OOP is good enough (all those web projects, RoR, etc.). Having short code in an expressive language leads to less bugs.
Static typing is extremely useful because it catches all mistakes of a certain class. However, other mistakes you still have to unit test for. So if you are unit&integration testing well, the benefit of static typing is small, and you are capturing more mistakes than static typing would.
For projects where you have contract-like, long-term stable interfaces/APIs, yes, use static typing. But don't pretend it's for every project.
If you demand security by all means, means will be tried that take away other things. So demand rights AND security. It's incorrect that we can't have both (as Bruce Schneier has iterated for the last 15 years).
The German government has stated that collecting connection information beyond 1 week is unreasonable and unjustified to fight crime and terrorism. If you have reasonable suspicion, convince a judge and get a warrant, then you can wiretap as you wish, and you have the recent history. If not, don't store the data.
The German government has a guideline for all IT projects promoting the principle of collecting the least data ("Datensparsamkeit" ~= "data frugality").
Data tends to be illegally used for other things then intended. And it is not effective. It costs the government and companies real money. And it costs people their privacy without seeing something in return besides promises.
Obama must be impeached. The Congressmen and Senators who support his actions must be impeached. The courts who OK this must be removed.
The Bush government should also be impeached for torture and violation of the rules of warfare ("enemy combatants" are not humans, starting illegal wars).
The laws have never been implemented. And it is not established that it is possible for them to be implemented.
See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics#Ambiguities_and_loopholes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics#Applications_to_future_technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_artificial_intelligence
If robot rules say robots aren't allowed to do X, doesn't that imply robots that do X are not allowed? So people thinking Asimovs laws are awesome should be in favor of a killer robot ban, until robots can be shown to follow the laws.
Should be /dev/video*
Flash applications have to be given the right to access the Webcam. You can rightclick in a flash thing and go to Settings / Global Settings and look at the privileges per site, or generally deny it (by default: ask for each domain).
Patients have had their DNA patented in the US by companies/researchers, and denied the right to grant others access to it.
This hypothesis is constantly disproven. Search for Boltzmann brains for research, or this neat talk:
spaghettification? What good isa physics engine if it can't turn every day objects into noodles?
Spaghettification is classical tidal forces, you don't need a special relativity engine for that, just a compact heavy object. What I would like to know is whether the engine also considers general relativity? Probably too complicated though, deforming space and so forth.
If courts decide GPL2 doesn't cover some loophole and people are abusing Linux in some way that Linus does not like, Linus is screwed. With Hurd, there is a license upgrade path.
Anonymous is as much a organisation as people waiting at a bus stop are. And guess what, criminals also take the bus.
There are some numbers in this newest comic: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1584
Let drunk drivers drive and they will get themselves killed.
Problem is, they harm others and don't consider this. Just consider someone drunk or angry with a gun in their hand.
Also, this might be the dawn of malware for Linux on the PC.
Haha, imagine you're the one who has to publish that all the dinosaurs were shiny pink!
AFAIK zlib is still the best if you measure the speed/compression ratio.
But technically the best way to get speed over compression is no compression at all (infinitely fast / 1).
No, because you also have to consider disk I/O time, and CPU time is relatively cheap, so on-the-fly compression is faster than no compression for many types of data.
Take zlib for example. Very little update in years. Yet its perfectly feasable that we could have a compressor that does 5% better (see 7z, kzip, etc). Yet everyone uses it.
AFAIK zlib is still the best if you measure the speed/compression ratio.
I really hope they don't put up ever more cameras. We don't need them. Crime has been falling since 1988 and the US murder rate is around 5.4 / 100,000 people. And that is close to its all time low. And terrorism is rare and unlikely to kill or hurt anyone. When can we start rolling out policy based on data and evidence not on fear?
Also, more policemen are more effective and cheaper (!) than cameras.
CCTV, unlike policemen wandering around, does not prevent violent crimes. It holds people accountable, but that is not on the mind of these people in these situation.
/sarcasm. Right, the universe just spontaneous came into existence.
From the Laws of Thermal Dynamics we know energy can not be created nor destroyed.
Einstein showed us all Matter is Energy.
Therefore the Universe has ALWAYS existed in one form or another.
Q.E.D.
Indeed, the curvature of the universe corresponds to negative energy, which can make the energy budget zero. See "A universe from nothing" by Lawrence Krauss (talk here) on why the energy budget can be zero.
One aspect in the big bang is that you can borrow energy from quantum mechanics if you give it back within a short time (the time needs to be shorter the more energy you borrow). Combine this with extremely fast inflation and you can run away with the energy you borrowed.
My freedom ends where yours begins. Full freedom means full responsibility for actions. No freedom means no responsibility.
But you can not have full freedom and no responsibility.
Wasn't his meaning more "you shouldn't be doing it on the internet?".
If so, we can agree that you shouldn't e.g. store pictures on a computer that is connected to the internet let alone upload it somewhere. However, this has little to do with the issue. People can upload photos of you without your consent, violating your privacy (the right to be left alone).
Just take the flux limit of the telescope you are using. Multiply by 4*pi*distance^2 (the area of emitting sphere), and the duration of observation, and you have the power you need to put in at the emitter (assuming an uncollimated emitter, without any atmospheric loss -- which is acceptable in radio).
Lets assume 15 mJy for the Allen Telescope Array used by SETI, and 1 hour of observation. That gives you 70 MW to emit. The Arecibo Message sent in 1974 was 1 MW, others are at the 150 kW level.
I like some Microsoft products, but honestly, if they ditch Windows, and move their products to .NET... then ensure the .NET platform runs on Apple, Linux and a few other platforms (not terribly hard, since the tech is mostly there anyway), I think they might see some improvement.
That might happen if Microsoft is split into two companies, one for the OS, and one for the Office suite, etc. That would bring a lot of benefit to the market.
anything that you do in public is by definition not private. Even if the public place is your yard.
Your yard is a private place, not a public one.